Health

There's money to be made from people's intimate needs BY TRACEY O'SHAUGHNESSY | REPUBLICAN-AMERICAN

Recently, the owners of my local gym ditched a few elephantine pieces of cardiovascular equipment to carve out a new swath of space. The sleek new chamber will be the exclusive province of personal trainers and their perspiring patrons.

Personal training is where all the money is in the fitness industry these days, largely because Americans have discovered they can sweat themselves into Lake Zoar and still not be able to squeeze themselves into a single-digit dress size. That, and our stunning proclivity to wrench, twist, sprain and otherwise erode our bodies straight to the orthopedic office has resulted the stunning growth in personal training, a field whose employment grew 44 percent from 2001 to 2011.

A good friend of mine has a personal trainer and every now and then this friend will email me images of herself, in spandex, showing off the "results" she has achieved via her personal trainer, which I consider the rough equivalent of offering me a nibble of her chef's crumb cake. My friend doesn't have a chef, though she does have: a cleaning woman, seamstress, landscaper, manicurist, hair stylist, colorist, esthetician, psychotherapist and, of course, Bev, the trainer, who is just a whiz on the glycemic index.

In her new book, "The Outsourced Self," sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild exposes this strange intersection between intimate needs and commerce. Personal trainers are a minor, and in many cases, negligible symptom of a more widespread condition in which we contract out our "emotional labor." We now have not only therapists, but life coaches, love coaches, wedding planners, household consultants, friendly visitors, baby coaches and, my favorite, "wantologists" who help us discover what we really desire.

Today, it is possible to rent out one's womb, hire a stranger to give birth, sell one's sperm, one's blood, even one's eggs. In such a marketplace, where intimate acts have become commercial transactions, can we wonder about the popularity of such Internet sites as "Rent-A-Friend," where you can plug in a few variables — gender, sexual orientation, age — and discover a world of potential friends, who pop up like car invoices, complete with the color and body type in which they come and activities for which they're available.

There are even love coaches who teach erstwhile online daters how to hook a live one. "Everyone needs to aim for the middle so they can widen their market," one love coach tells Hochschild. Mediocrity and concision triumph, particularly in a medium where the user's next mouse click might be Peapod. "They want to quickly comb through the racks and snap their fingers, next next next. You can be too efficient, too focused on your list of desired characteristics, so intent on getting the best deal that you pass over the right one," the coach confides.

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So unimaginative and transactional have we become that there is a growing field of "nameologist," in which "professionals" charge up to $350 to give your child the most suitable moniker. (Silly me, I named mine after a saint.)

Technology, unsurprisingly, has made this easier. The Wall Street Journal reports on the growing number of apps for everything, including wearisome errands. Exec allows you to hire a personal assistant for shopping or cleaning. Get It Now delivers everything from tacos to toilet paper in under an hour throughout San Francisco. TaskRabbit finds someone to do your laundry, pick up your prescription, water your lawn or walk your dog with a tap of the finger.

"It is getting simpler to be slothful in a world where there is now an app for everything," the newspaper writes.

In a way, none of this is new. The moneyed class has always had its servants to feed them, wash them, turn down their coverlets and tuck them in to bed. But in too many of the outsourcing examples Hochschild cites, the Gal Friday rarely meets her employer. He or she is merely the mechanism of a transaction accessed through the swipe of a finger tip. This leads to what Hochschild calls the "depersonalization of our bonds with others."

Despite its often cumbersome nature, the constant rubbing up against strangers from different social and economic classes lubricate the gears of civility that generate empathy and make society run humanely. The more we divorce ourselves from those kinds of social interchanges, the coarser society becomes and the less well we know one another — and ourselves.

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